The Taste of Blood
by Ieyre
Summary: Mary fights like her mother and grieves like her father. Sometimes simultaneously. Cora and Mary, following the events of 3x05.


"I've been—I've come to fetch you." She hovered at the doorway for a moment. "For dinner."

"I'll be down in a minute, Mary, thank you." Her mother's voice was docile, with an eerie sort of pleasantness that her eldest daughter couldn't replicate, even if she wanted to.

Mary's eyes lingered on the perfectly crisp and smooth coverlet of her parents' bed, the bed that they had been sleeping in for as long as she could remember. She'd sneaked into this room, occasionally, when she was a very small girl. Mary had always tested the limits of her parents' patience, and pulling pillows off of the upstairs beds had been one means to an end.

This was the bed her father had not slept in in over a month.

"Is there anything else?"

Her mother was choosing between two necklaces. She'd always told Mary that one of the benefits of going into mourning was that everything goes with black. It wasn't much consolation.

"That one," she said, pointing at the chain on the right. It was silver, with a rather brilliant emerald cast in a heart-shaped setting.

"Your father gave that to me." She did not touch it. "For our twentieth wedding anniversary."

"It's lovely."

"The style is very out of fashion," her mother replied, flatly, not looking at her.

"I don't think so. There are some things that never go out of fashion." She took a few more steps into her mother's sanctuary, feeling as though she were crossing some metaphoric line. "Papa has good taste."

"He's your father, naturally you think that. You've been conditioned to agree with him from birth."

For a long moment Mary did nothing, _felt _nothing, before a blinding, white hot anger rose in her. It came from the pit of her stomach, went up through the tips of her fingers...her fists clenched of their own accord. It was a visceral rage, like none she'd ever felt in her life, and with it came the sudden, almost irrational urge to strike her mother, to _hurt_ her for being so selfish, for acting as though her love for Sybil was worth more than the rest of theirs, more than Papa's was. For acting as though _punishing_ him like this even made her feel better, when it was clear she was more miserable by the day, was letting herself slip down into a well of grief. For blaming Papa when he blamed himself more than anyone else ever could, and because it was easier to hurl accusations at someone you could hurt than someone hammered in to the front window of St. Michael's.

She was angry at herself, too—for not being able to protect her little darling of a sister then, or her Papa now. She knew she could never give either of them the comfort they could give each other, and to see her mother rebuff every attempt her poor lost father made to reach out to her, to offer solace and seek it return, was cruelty in her eyes. She was told to give her time, to imagine what it must feel like to lose a child, to try to understand—but she doesn't want to. Isn't losing a sister bad enough, to have seen Papa's daughter die, what will imagining losing Matthew's daughter do except twist the knife further? What was perspective worth if _that_ was the cost?

Isn't it bad enough that she feels this powerless?

She does not strike her mother. She does not shout, or scream, or even pull the pillows off the bed. Instead she waits a moment, expressionless, before picking it up from the table.

"That necklace is a custom-made Cartier," she said, turning it over in her hands, methodically. "You know they don't accept commissions from people with no taste."

Steely contempt coats the words like lye. She won't feel guilty for this, she tells herself, if her mother derived comfort from hating Papa then let her. Mary won't forget. To pile cold indifference on top of grief and guilt was an act of _war_ as far as she was concerned. It was all the better, for she was spoiling for a fight.

_Sound the drums._

It is the weakness of it that angers her, the self-indulgence of it. If Sybil had died on Clarkson's operating table she knows that Papa would never have held_ her _responsible. He could never derive comfort from hurting, even in this, the darkest night of the soul a man can live through. He didn't have the hunter's instinct, the killer's drive. Her father was, stripped of title and bluster and everything else-soft, simple, easy to love and easy to wound. A herbivore.

But she wasn't, and she would fight his battles for him if she needed to.

This irrational desire to hurt—_to taste blood—_made her feel even smaller, even more like a child, and as she walked out of bedroom and into the corridor she stumbled, a sudden, nauseating wave of shame washing over her. She had fled rather than fight, not one of her righteously indignant accusations having risen to her lips except the opaque inference that her mother had naturally bad taste in jewelry. She had not had it in her to verbally parry, or defend Papa, or even overpower. The fight had been knocked out of her by the knowledge, deep in her heart of hearts, that it wouldn't have made anything better. That she _couldn't._

She was more like her father than she knew.

Mary could think of only one person on earth who she trusted, now, who knew how to fix things, who understood the way to make things right again—if they can ever be even close to right.

Tomorrow she'd go and see Granny.

* * *

**My first instinct was to just let this stand on its own, but then I thought it might be a good idea to explain a little about this story, lest I be accused of writing Mary as an unfeeling you-know-what to her mother. **

**This came from the assumption, based on the preview, that Cora will continue to blame and freeze Robert out for at least a few weeks following the events of 3x05. Mary is not a wallower, and being as close to and protective of her father as she is, combined with the grief of losing Sybil, it wasn't hard for me to imagine her becoming extremely angry at Cora's very natural response to Sybil's death. I drew from my own experience of grief and loss in a family and hope that I did justice to the characters.**


End file.
